Through his research and teaching, Ben Doleac has explored African American music and dance as discourses of resistance and expressive tools of survival, from jazz to funk, hip hop and beyond. His current research examines the New Orleans brass band parade known as the second line, detailing how black New Orleanians have utilized the parade to respond to trauma and resist systematic racism creative expression and political action against systematic racism from the Jim Crow era through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2014, Doleac won a Graduate Fellowship at the Smithsionian National Museum of American History, where he researched the early history of jazz. His writing has been published in Ethnomusicology Review and The Yearbook of Traditional Music. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, Doleac has been a performing vocalist for more than two decades in ensembles ranging from Harvard’s Kumbaa Singers to the UCLA Balkan Choir.
Music and culture of the African diaspora; interrelationship between music and dance; popular music; American history; postcolonial theory; urban studies.
PhD in Ethnomusicology, UCLA, 2018; M.A. in Music (Ethnomusicology), the University of Alberta, 2011; B.A. in English, Wesleyan University, 2005
